


Inkstains

by LinearA



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Body Calligraphy, F/M, Ink, Paint Kink, Post-Crait, Too bad there are only two movies in the sequel trilogy ah well
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:42:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22900420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LinearA/pseuds/LinearA
Summary: In her waking hours, Rey's bond with Kylo Ren is her dirty secret, marked by bitterness and hostility since Crait. At night, in her dreams, she lets him write on her with brush and ink."Ink keeps secrets," he tells her.(Originally written for the Reylo Charity Anthology, Volume 2, published February 14, 2020.)
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 101
Kudos: 410
Collections: Reylo Charity Anthology: Volume 2





	Inkstains

**Author's Note:**

> In what we will roughly call "canonical" Star Wars materials, there are two alphabets used for the strangely-English-like language our heroes speak: Aurebesh, and High Galactic. The latter seems to be indistinguishable from the English alphabet.
> 
> Ben Solo's calligraphy set, as pictured in the Star Wars reference book, uses Chinese-style brushes rather than pens. Rey's journal _(Rey's Survival Guide)_ is written in High Galactic.
> 
> * * *
> 
> Thank you very much to everyone who was able to contribute to the Reylo Charity Anthology. I was so grateful for the contributions we were able to make.
> 
> Some very beautiful (and nsfw) art was done for this story by [HouseofFinches](https://twitter.com/HouseOfFinches)([ko-fi](https://ko-fi.com/houseoffinches)), and that can be found [here.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EoPy_x7XEAAskW5?format=jpg&name=small)

Rey dreams that she holds her hand out to the Supreme Leader of the First Order, and that he takes it in his. His hand is bare, and warm. He turns hers over gently, so that her palm is up, and he writes on her skin. He writes with a brush; it makes her fingers twitch. The lines are smooth and small and precise. He writes in black ink, slowly. He writes in Aurebesh. _Forn. Isk._

She feels sad and strange. High Galactic is for thoughts, feelings, poetry. Aurebesh is for dog-tags and instruction manuals and _pull to inflate._

“What are you doing?” she asks.

He doesn’t look up. “Can’t you read?”

She can’t read it, actually; his brush is in the way. His big fingers, curled around her hand to keep it still. But she can feel it. The lines on her skin build in her mind. _Norn. Dom._ She squirms. But only her body; she keeps her hand still for him. _Mem. Esk._

_Find me._

He wrote it. But it’s written on her. In Aurebesh, like a technical command. _Lift hatch. Insert key. Press to start._

_Find me._

“Who finds?” she asks. “Who gets found?”

He traces a vein in her wrist with his ink. She wakes up.

There’s engine grease in the lines of her palm. Dirt under her fingernails. No ink.

* * *

She’s alone in the Falcon, making the best repairs she can, when the comforting mechanical sounds of the ship fall away, and she can feel that he’s there, even before she sees him, scowling down at her as she kneels in front of an open panel. 

“I’ll destroy you all.”

“You’ll try.” Because that’s who he is, isn’t he? Deranged, delusional, violent. Not the man she thought she saw when she touched his hand. It’s good of him to remind her so quickly.

“You should have joined me. You’re wasting your power, wasting yourself, on people who will never understand you. You think they care for you? They want you for your power. Not yourself.”

“That’s not true.” _That’s not true, that’s not true, that’s not true._ She orders herself to remember it. “Finn came back for me. He didn’t even know what I could do. _You’re_ the one who wanted to use me. To train me the way you liked, and make me like you. Like Snoke.”

He falls back. His face is bloodless and his voice is faint and high as he chokes with anger and shame. “I’m not like Snoke.”

“How,” she says flatly. “How are you not like Snoke? You’re the Supreme Leader of the First Order. Have you stopped the invasions and the extractions and the strike-breaking and the child-stealing? You do everything he did. All you need is a new apprentice.”

“I wouldn’t — I would never hurt you.”

“You’ve already hurt me.” She stands to face him. She knows there are tears in her eyes, for the loss of her dream of Ben Solo, for the shame of her own failure. _Please don’t go this way._ “I tried to help you. I won’t make that mistake again.”

He swallows hard. “Neither will I.” Maybe he means it to be a snarl, but it comes out unsteady. Tremulous. “We’re — enemies.”

She kneels back down, returning to her work. “You’re the Supreme Leader. Your word is law.”

* * *

It isn’t always as easy as Rey’d like to get to sleep, but she does sleep. In her dream, she can see the little bowl of ink, the slow dip of his brush. “I always write in High Galactic,” she blurts.

He pauses. Ink gathers at the tip of the brush, poised above the bowl. Rey waits for the drop to form, to fall. But then he wipes the tip carefully against the edge, and holds out his empty hand for hers. “All right. High Galactic.”

She’s slow, putting her hand into his, palm up like last time, but he waits. He holds very still.

The ink is cool against her skin. The line is very thin; she barely feels it. “The mark of Aurebesh calligraphy,” he says, in a slow, half-absent voice, “is precision. Sharp edges. Exact angles. It’s hard, with a brush. Takes patience.” 

The line has slowly thickened, curved. “And you have patience, do you?”

“Sometimes.” The brush doubles back, crossing the last line. Is it an R? But he lifts the brush too soon. A soft flick of ink in the hollow of her hand. She shivers.

“I can’t feel what you’re writing.”

“That’s all right.” The brush is a whisper, slow small sounds. “You’ll see it soon enough.”

She waits. She can feel the ink drying, the wet curl and swash of the fresh letters. He lifts the brush, but for a long moment he keeps hold of her hand. She reads the words between his fingers.

_Find me._

She wakes up.

* * *

The next time she sees him, she’s picking her way through a swamp, sweaty and tired. She feels him there, and steps to the largest spot of dry ground she can find, shrugging off her pack. It’s like a storm, she’s decided, this connection. You can’t predict it. You can’t stop it. You just have to wait it out.

He must be somewhere cold. His hood is up, and his cloak is wrapped tightly around him. It makes her sweat just to look at his layers of quilting.

He’s quiet for a long moment, and it reminds her of her dream. But she won’t offer him her hand, not in waking life, not through the Force. _(Could I bring him here?_ she wonders, remembering how he’d come, somehow, into a little hut on Ach-To. But why would she want to bring him?)

“I didn’t think you’d be my apprentice,” is what he finally says.

“No? Didn’t want me to bow down and call you ‘master’?”

He blushes dark red. “I — I wanted you to be my — Snoke used to say I was his friend.”

“The kind of friend who kneels?” She shouldn’t say it, shouldn’t remind both of them of those terrifying, tense moments when she’d seen him kneel at Snoke’s throne, when she called him _Ben Solo,_ and they were sparks of the Force in that scarlet-black room. It makes her heart beat faster. She’d knelt, too, looking up at him, and he’d saved her and she’d — “Is that what you want?”

He doesn’t answer. He’s breathing hard and his emotions are a dark blur. She could name every single feeling that’s wrapping itself around his throat, but even one — _humiliation_ — makes her feel where it’s blooming in her cheeks, too. And if she named the others, would feel them? She can’t risk thinking about it.

“You don’t care what I want,” he says at last.

“We all have to care what you want, don’t we, ‘Supreme Leader?’ You wanted power. Now you have it. When will it be enough to make you happy?”

He stands still and tracks her with his eyes. Like she’s a wild animal who might eat him. Or eat out of his hand. “Happy.” He licks his lips. “Do you do what you do because you think it’ll make you _happy?”_

“It’s not — I don’t — that’s not what matters!” His tracking look turns knowing. She hates it. He thinks he knows her; he thinks she’s just like him. “I would have been happy if my parents had come back.”

“But you knew they weren’t really going to.”

It hurts. It hurts so badly. “Did you really think I was going to join you?” she asks, low and contemptuous.

Now he’s hurt too. Badly. She’s satisfied, and sorry. And then he’s gone.

She cries to Finn, about her parents, telling him what Kylo made her know she knew. He makes soft noises and holds her, but later, she hears him, his voice warped by pain, trying not to cry, telling Rose how he’ll never know who his parents were, how it keeps him up at night, wondering if they were mourning for him while he was being programmed to forget them. And Rose makes soft noises against his shoulder, but later, when she’s supposed to be on shift, she’s clutching her pendant and staring blindly at star charts of the Otomok System, where she was born. So a wave of pain is spreading out, and Rey and Kylo Ren are at the center of it.

Rey takes Rose’s shift.

* * *

When it’s time and past time Rey slept, she finds she’s hot and restless; she’d touch herself if she weren’t bedded down on a mat half a meter from Poe on one side and Chewie on the other. She meditates, to make him — it, the feeling — go away. The credo from the books. _There is no emotion, there is peace._ (How can there be peace when there’s always a war?) _There is no ignorance, there is knowledge._ (But there’s so much she doesn’t know.) _There is no passion, there is serenity._

She repeats it until she falls asleep.

Rey dreams he’s unwinding the wrapping from her right arm. He’s impatient about it, yanking it away from the wrist up, and his hands tremble; he seems more like the Kylo she knows. (Except he is patient, sometimes, isn’t he? There’s stillness in him somewhere.) He sighs when her arm is bare. “I needed more space.”

“The whole galaxy wasn’t enough?”

He curls his hand lightly around her wrist and dips his brush.

The first upstroke, across the tender spot where he holds her, is a lick of wet black ink. “It’s cold,” she says, breathless.

“That’s why you shivered?” No, it’s not. Every sweep and whorl of his brush is soothing and coaxing something under her skin. Between every few marks he stops to dip the brush, and makes her wait. Every letter takes so many strokes. Three short, fast strokes and then a long, slow curl. For no reason; she can feel the letter complete on her skin already. The curve is only there — he finishes her thought — “To make it beautiful.”

“So you’re not — not saying anything. Only making a pretty picture out of letters?” The line tapers as he rolls the brush. Barely touching her.

 _There is no emotion,_ he writes, _there is only peace._ He’s mocking her. Tormenting her with these feathery touches of his brush, to write that. _Peace is a lie; there is only passion._ Delicate letters that he traces so carefully up the length of her arm. Wet black lines in the crease of her elbow, along the curve of her bicep.

“It’s only a picture made of letters,” she says. Her mouth is dry. “It doesn’t make sense.” Her voice is a whisper, and the brush whispers over her skin. _There is no death, there is only the Force. The Force shall free me._

“It doesn’t make sense,” he agrees, and his voice is a whisper too, so close to her ear. He lets go of her wrist and puts his hand under her chin. She gasps; he tilts her head back and her whole body goes with it. She catches herself on her arms, one wrapped in fabric, the other wrapped in ink. He holds her chin steady, with big warm careful fingers, and his brush laps the bare skin above her collar bone, skimming the hollows of her throat. He writes all the way across, perfectly centered on the dimple above her breastbone, and then draws a long curve down, down into the shallow valley between her breasts.

“What does it say?” she gasps, as his brush lingers, curling the line back on itself.

“If it’s only a pretty picture made with letters,” he says, and he’s still holding her jaw and he puts his mouth against her neck, “does it really matter?” Every touch of his brush has been chilly and precise, but his mouth is hot and it melts against her. His lips and tongue make soft words in a burning line along her throat. “Ink keeps secrets. Aren’t I your secret?”

She feels his teeth and wakes up, moaning in the dark.

* * *

Rey’s angry with herself every time sees him in holos and on posters. Every time she sees his image in flickering blue light, or flat against a wall, she thinks of how she saw him _wrong._ He touched her hand, and she saw him, she thought she saw him, tall and furious and full of light, nobody’s servant and nobody’s master. But it wasn’t true. She went to find him, so full of hope and longing for that bright, free man, Ben Solo, and he didn’t turn. He tried to make _her_ turn.

That hurts, too. That he looked at her and saw darkness. It makes her angrier. Angry at him. So it slips out of her, the next time she sees him. “You deceived me.”

“How?” he demands. “What did I do?”

“You showed me a false vision. When we — touched.”

He turns his head away. His eyes are red, with dark marks like bruises underneath. “We were both deceived. It must have been him. Been Snoke.”

“Why would he deceive _you?”_

He turns his face away from her. “To mock me,” he mutters.

“Mock you?”

His eyes are screwed shut and a voice like bitter syrup pours through his lips: _“‘Poor stupid boy. You believed my little picture, did you? Thought she’d turn for your sake? You thought she’d come for you. Idiot child. She came for what you could offer her cause. Ben is not a_ person _to her, any more than he was to your uncle. Just a vessel for the Jedi’s dreams. No one but me has ever seen_ you, _wanted_ you _— ’”_

She slaps her hand over his mouth, her chest hot with agony, but he keeps talking, his real voice spilling out against her fingers. “He was right; he was right; he was the only one who knew me and now he’s dead. I killed him. I’m all alone.” His knees buckle, and she goes with him, hand still tight against his lips. His breath is hot like it is in her dreams. 

She’s touching him; she’s somewhere else. She’s fallen through space towards his need, the way he fell towards hers, in the darkness by the fire. Everything here is white, and he lies on the floor like a pool of black ink.

“Ben, no,” she whispers, holding his head. “No. No.”

“No what?” he asks thickly.

“He didn’t know you. He didn’t understand you.” There’s nothing she’s more sure of. “He only ever hurt you.”

His fingers dig into her arms through their wrappings. “But he was right.”

“Ben, in my vision — I wanted it so badly. You don’t understand how badly I wanted to see it come true.” There’s water in her eyes. “And yes, I thought if you were with me we would win, because we would be _unstoppable,_ but that isn’t _what I wanted;_ I saw that — that you were happy. You were free, and you were so, so happy. And I wanted you like that. I wanted you so badly.”

His eyes go wide. They’re bloodshot and such a soft brown. “I — no, I dreamed this,” he says, confused. “This isn’t — I dreamed this.”

Every muscle in her body goes rigid. “You dream about me?” She dreams about him; that makes sense. There’s a reason for it. (What reason?) But if he dreams about her — then — 

He’s gone stiff, too; his hands come off her like she burns him. “Rey — do you dream about me?”

He knows. He can’t know. She shakes her head. But she shakes it too hard.

“You do,” he says, and his voice is pure surprise. “I thought you wouldn’t. I thought it was only me. But — you do.”

She lets go of him and falls back on her heels, catching herself on her arms — that was in _her_ dream, but then he came with her, and his mouth was — his eyes are wild and wide, and there’s a sound, a real sound of something nearby, and he looks up, throwing out a hand. Then he’s gone.

* * *

She takes a supply mission, to the grassland traders of Ukio. It’s petty and tedious and safe, and she accomplishes it without incident. Then she comms the Resistance. Finn answers, frowning. “Rey? Is everything okay?”

“I’m all right. But I — I think I might be — it might be dangerous for you if I came back right now.”

“You’re being followed?”

“Not exactly.” _Pursued? Haunted?_ No. “I’m not sure. I just — I don’t want to put you in danger. I’m putting the supply pallets on the ferry to Belwaj under the name Temmin Crasnik, all right? I’m safe here, and when I know I can come back to you safely, I’ll let you know where to meet me.”

She signs off before he can protest.

She stays out that night, walking from the trading post, afraid to even think of sleeping, until she’s far away from everything, in a field of long grass. The galaxy is spread out clean and calm overhead, and then she can’t think of anything else but laying down her cloak and curling up.

She dreams she’s naked to her waist, lying on her front with her arms folded under her head. He could kill her so easily. She feels his knees set down on either side of her waist, and she holds her breath and waits for the first touch of the brush. It comes in a long slow caress of her shoulder blade, and Rey exhales in a long slow breath to match it. He writes his way across her back with careful strokes and gentle flourishes, and any picture she can form of what he’s writing blurs into the sensation of the cool skate of brush across her skin. The ink pulls slightly at her skin as it dries.

“Are you writing secrets?” she asks, as the path of the letters makes its way to the middle of her back.

“I have enough secrets to cover all of you.”

“Will you tell me what it says?”

He blows a hot breath along her spine, and she gasps. “Wet ink runs,” he murmurs, so close to her skin, but it isn’t his mouth she feels next. One hot bare finger sinks into the soft flesh at the small of her back. “A Jedi scribe would have a seal.” He draws a little circle, and the blunt tip of his finger is so different from the fine line of the brush. “I’d pour hot wax, and press.”

“A Jedi scribe?”

“I have enough secrets to cover every inch of your skin.”

Her back tingles with words she can’t read. “I want my turn.”

She puts him on his back, with his arms over his head. She remembers the white swell of his naked chest, and the stiff black stuff of his trousers. When she puts her knees astride him, her legs are spread so wide that she’s close to sitting on him, just an inch, if that, of space between the seam in her leggings and the fastening of trousers.

“Wait,” he says, and she freezes. “You have your own brush. And your own ink.”

That’s true, she realizes in her dream. She picks them up and tries to remember the way she’s seen him dip and wipe the brush. One drop falls on his skin, and she frowns. “Shouldn’t you be the one who writes in red?” Red is for the dark side.

“You’ll write on me with red,” he says. “Soon enough.”

She pauses, looking at that drop where it fell beneath his ribs. She touches it with the fine tail of the brush, and his eyes slip closed.

She uses the ink to draw a tight little loop around his left nipple. He bites his lip. She strokes over it, back and forth, with the wet brush, and Ben’s head falls to one side and he squirms underneath her. With his arms stretched up, the dimple of his navel peaks over the edge of his pants, and she traces the rim of it, working the soft brush, while he shudders. She paints just the tip of his right nipple, watching it harden, dipping her brush without wiping it so she can watch the ink run down and trickle through the scant fine hairs around it. When she leans down to blow across the wet ink, her hips shift and that scant inch of space disappears; she’s pressed tight against him as he moans and clenches his fists.

She writes her name on him, then, in big red messy High Galactic letters, _REY,_ as she grinds down against him, relishing the way he writhes, the way he tries to shift himself so the thick ridge in his pants can press against her the way he wants, and tweaks his scarlet nipples with her thumbs. “Please,” he groans, and she laughs, and paints a teasing line along the scar she gave him.

It looks like blood.

“Ben,” she says, suddenly still, “when you said I’d write on you with red...”

His eyes open. Unfocused and dark with pleasure. “Soon enough.” His fingertips skim over her knees and up her thighs. When she squirms, his head rolls back and he grips her tightly, each hand more than half-circling her thigh. “You’re so strong,” he sighs, as her muscles flex under his fingers. “Keep writing.”

“Writing what?” she asks. It’s harder to breathe. He has her where he wants her now, with the soft hollow between her thighs rolling against his trapped and twitching cock, and he’s arching his hips up, his eyes closed again, his mouth open. She can feel herself getting warm and wet. Her name is written on his chest, like he belongs to her. She drops the ink bowl and brush; they bounce against his straining stomach and clatter away. She puts her hands on his chest (warm, he’s so warm and firm, his cock is so hard and thick), her fingers skim through spilled red ink and she scrawls her name like a child writing in the dust. Her wet red fingers pinch his nipples. He yelps, his hips pumping helplessly, and she lets her head fall back and her eyes fall closed.

Then his voice is behind her, raw against her ear, and his hands are on her hips. “What do you dream about me, Rey?”

She twists. He’s still warm but he isn’t between her legs anymore; she isn’t being rubbed like she was, and she misses it. She slides her hand down to compensate, pressing her fingers tight against her cunt through the thin fabric of her pants and rocking. Oh, she’s so wet. Her shirt is back on; he’s holding her close but she can’t feel his skin against hers. The ink on his chest — it’ll stain her shirt. It’ll soak through and smear the beautiful secrets he wrote on her back. (The feeling of the brush against her skin, so soft and sure.) “What did you write on me?”

Her voice comes out a bleary mumble. He groans and rolls her on her front, pinning her down. She keeps working her fingers between her legs, and his hips push spasmodically against her, a crude imitation of her drowsy rhythm. His warmth and weight are like a drug, and she can feel his cock again, hard against her ass. She adds a little wiggle to her rocking, for his benefit, and he sucks air through his teeth.

“Did you dream about me writing on you, Rey?”

“You had your brush,” she mumbles. Her cloak is rough against her lips. “You wrote ‘find me’ even though I already tried to and it didn’t work, and then you wrote some mixed up code about passion and peace, and then you were writing secrets and you said you’d put your seal on me, if you were a Jedi scribe, so I wrote my name on you, but — ”

He interrupts her. “You dream we write on each other?” His hips are moving hard against her ass. She likes it; it jolts her and it pushes her harder against her own fingers. “I dream we write on each other too. Not with ink. With sweat and spit and bruises where we hold too tight. I dream you’re so wet for me I can dip my fingers into you and smear it down my chest and stomach, all the way to my cock.” When he says the word he grinds it into her and she whimpers, just a little. He gasps and his fingers clench in the cloak beside her face. “Are you wet for me?”

“Yes, I’m — ”

“I can smell you — ” he hisses.

“Touch me,” she orders him, and his hands are tearing at her clothes as she fumbles ties undone and loosens drawstrings. She can hear seams ripping, feel worn fabric strain as he yanks her pants to her knees and shoves one grasping hand inside her shirt while the other fights with hers to touch her pussy. The broken noises that he makes when she moves her hand and lets him press his groping fingers against her make her clench.

“Ben,” she cries out. He’s so hot and heavy on her back. She can smell his sweat, and hear the wind rustling in the grass of Ukio. “Ben, I’m — ” Is she awake? With his hands on her like this; is he really here?

“I dream I fuck you, Rey,” he grunts, his mouth in her hair and his hips rocking into her ass. “I dream you like it.”

“Yes.” She’s struggling for air. When he pushes himself up to rip open the fastenings of his clothes, she snatches breaths of cold night air and pushes her hips back.

“I dream you’re not ashamed of me. I dream you want me.”

“Yes.” Rey’s weight is on her knees and elbows, and she thinks she’s braced, but when he presses himself in, she falls forward with a cry, split open. He makes a frantic sound, pawing at her hips and back like he’s forgotten how his body works. She didn’t know her body _could_ work like this, that it could take so much inside her. “Big,” she gasps.

He licks her neck. It feels just like his writing brush, but warmer, softer. He licks her again, and thrusts again. “Tight,” he growls, and his teeth close on her shoulder for an instant, bent over her where she’s panting. Then he rocks into her, and it all feels so good. His teeth, his tongue, his cock, the radiant warmth of his body and the brush of his hair against her skin.

He fucks her, steady and hard. His voice is a pained whisper. “I dream I come on your back, Rey. On your sweet little tits. You put your fingers in it and paint it on my mouth.” His pace speeds up and her mouth opens. Her scream is almost silent, an aching little noise in her throat, as he drives into her, words still coming out of him. “And it’s writing; it’s not words but it’s a _sign,_ all of it’s a sign that you let me take off all your clothes and touch you and you wanted me to make you come and you wanted me to come for you and you trusted me.”

“Ah — ah — ah — ” She bites down on the cloak and screams against it as she comes, convulsing, squeezing down on him.

“Like I wasn’t your dirty secret,” he chokes out. “Like I was just — _yours.”_

He pulls out, crushing his soaking wet cock against the soft cheek of her ass, and hot spurts flood across her back. He falls against her, shoving his arm around her waist and rolling on his side. And yes, she is awake. Those are the stars over Ukio, this is her cloak; there is no ink or brush, there’s only the Supreme Leader of the First Order, the tyrant, the killer, breathing hard, with his naked body tight against hers. Ben.

“I thought I’d be a Jedi scribe, once,” he whispers into her shoulder. “When I thought all the wars were over. They told me they were over. That there would always be peace.”

 _Peace is a lie, there is only passion,_ he wrote on her arm. “So you… wrote things down? Did you like that?” She strokes the soft hair on the back of his wrist. “Did it make you happy?”

“I don’t know.”

“I wish it had.” _I wish it had brought you peace,_ she thinks.

“I had a set of brushes. I was proud of them. Endorian goat-hair, with fathier-hair cores. I made the ink myself, with a grindstone.” He snorts. “I was proud of my handwriting. My calligraphy.”

“If that part of what I dreamt is true — in my dream, you — you said I’d write on you in red. It looked like blood.”

“Maybe you’ll kill me. Maybe I’ll deserve it. I’m your enemy, aren’t I?”

She remembers the ferocious joy she felt, seeing her name scrawled on his chest. She was nobody, Rey from nowhere, but she wrote her nobody’s name on the Supreme Leader, on the man with the Skywalker blood. And he was hers.

“But couldn’t it mean something else? If both our dreams are true — ”

She feels him shrug, before his chin settles against her hair. “Jedi have prophetic dreams. The dark side is a liar.”

“But you dreamt we — ” She reaches back and between them, touching the sticky smears on her back. “And we did.”

His soft voice goes dull. “Are you going to go back to your friends and tell them you let me touch you like this? Are you going to tell anyone I’m yours?” He takes a deep breath. She can hear the tears close his throat. “Uncle Luke always said the dark side liked to mock.”

She turns over under his arm, so she can see his wet, despairing eyes. Her fingers trace his jaw. “There are so many things you could do. To make me proud of you.”

He shuts his eyes. “What if I’m not strong enough to do them? What if I’m too afraid?”

“You have to be strong enough, Ben. You have to be brave. Please.”

He doesn’t answer that; he twines her fingers tightly into his and slides his head between her breasts with a faint little kiss. She strokes his hair with her free hand and asks him again. “Please.”

The stars fade out with the rising sun on Ukio, and he’s gone.


End file.
